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Tuesday, February 21, 2012

OrcCon 2012

This weekend, I cruised down to the Gateway Sheraton to check out what was going on at OrcCon 2012! I had a bunch of stuff to check out as a couple of my buddies were playing in the Broadside Bash, a bunch of people were playing in the warma/hordes tourney, and I was really excited to catch up with the SoCal Malifaux guys in person!

Check out after the jump for some reviews of the stuff they had there and what I thought of the con!

Broadside Bash

My buddy Casey played in the BSB, as well as a couple other guys I am acquainted with. This tourney is billed as more hobby friendly, so comp and painting are highly enforced. I'm all for painting being highly enforced at high level tourneys, but comp is a silly thing. It's highly subjective as it's not really defined anywhere as to what makes a list comp-friendly. That's one of the main reasons I didn't want to play.

But on the other hand, the armies looked amazing! Check out these daemons and tyranids.

I caught them in the middle of shit being about to go down

Shit going down

In addition to the armies looking awesome, the tables and the terrain looked great. This looked like a really well put together event. Good job guys!

Warmachine and hordes are really heating up at my FLGS. Hence, a bunch of folks from game empire were at the con playing it! I only caught a couple rounds, but Travis had won both of his games so far and Brandon was in the middle of an intense game.

I'm not sold on warmachine being the next big thing, as I sold all my stuff for it, but it looks like the community is passionate and thriving!

Malifaux

I got to see a couple rounds of the Malifaux tourney as well! This was my first time seeing the game played so I was pretty excited. I got to talk to Octave from SoCal Malifaux a bit while I was there too. Those guys are super cool. He offered to give me a demo game and offered to let me use one of his crews to play in the tourney! That was super cool of him, but I didn't have the time unfortunately.

I got to see a bunch of crews and get some exposure to the game so that was awesome. One of these days, I will actually meet up with those guys for a game, haha.

Legend of the 5 rings

I mentioned this in the previous article, but I used to be pretty heavy into L5r. So I was excited to check ou their booth in the dealer room. It looks like AEG has a bunch of stuff going on nowadays. They had demos of their game ninja going on, (Check the description and pricing here) as well as a full display of the new L5r set.

I wondered over to the collectibles hall and they were doing demos of L5r, so I sat my ass down to see how the game had changed in 10 years. The dude putting on the demos had a bunch of pre-cons of the various clans and I randomly got a dragon deck! Awesome! I love me some Dragon clan!

I was paired up with a gentleman playing mantis. This was pretty cool as I had never played against someone using mantis before. They were not a full clan the last time I played.

It was interesting to see how the clan had changed and how the mechanics had changed. A lot of stuff no longer required bowing, you start with extra gold holdings in play from turn one, the rings now can be used before putting them into play as battle actions, and the rings also seemed much easier to get out as I was able to get 2 out during my game.

I ended up losing as the Mantis dude was pulling stuff in good order and he had an ass load of ranged attacks that didn't require bowing. Also, his stronghold provides great synergy to the guys in the pre-con. It let him do two sequential ranged attacks. The first of which lowers the targets F instead of killing him. So the first shot lowers the F and the second hopefully kills him! Also, it gave him Reconnaissance which buffed some of his other guys. It was great fun though and I ended up getting a dragon pre-con for myself!

Rusted Heroes

This is a new skirmish level table-top game by Fantization miniatures. Check out the rusted heroes website itself for more info on the miniature range and gameplay information.

The reason I bring it up is because they had this awesome dungeon set up for the demo. Check it

Photography skills are a WIP!

I was talking to the guys there and they said this was more of an apocalypse point level map. The point levels of regular games are similar to warmachine (In the 35-50 range). This map was going to be a 400 point battle! I'm just saying, why don't we ever play 40k on lava castles with big dragons looking out over us???

War Gamma miniatures

As I was about to leave, I thought I would take one last look in the dealer room. And am I glad I did! I totally missed this booth the first time through, but a crowd was hanging around so I figured I should join in. I'm not one to turn down a gathering mob!
Once people dissipated a bit, I caught a glimpse of the awesomeness that is war gamma miniatures! The first thing I noticed was the painted lava pools.

They look freakin awesome painted like that, but there are a couple painting options available as shown on the site. From there, I noticed the cool bases that he had on display. Check out these bad boys. I will be doing a full review on these later in the week as I picked some up for myself. I thought they would make the perfect bases for Grey Knights. Like their every footstep makes a daemon infested world writhe in agony!
Check out a preview of one I painted

Salt flats have changed since I was a kid...

Overall impressions

It's been a while since I've been to any cons, but it looks like OrcCon is starting to come back up. Back in the day, it was The Con to go to in SoCaland had tourney coverage of every game you could think of. My buddies that still were going for the last couple years said that it fell off a bit though. But I'm glad to see it's still vital and lots of people are coming to enjoy their hobbies! Hopefully next year I'll be able to play in some of the tournies and spend more than a couple hours there!